Incentive items to entice a consumer to purchase a product have been used for many years. Packaging labels which include materials of value or interest to consumers are also known in the art. Typically, such materials include coupons, mail-in rebates, sweepstakes entry forms, product literature or related product information. Such materials are typically delivered by bulky multi-panel labels, expanded content labels or expanded content labels affixed to a product package.
Coupons that peel off of a package for immediate redemption are also known in the art. Such coupons entice consumers to make an immediate purchase of the product in order to save money. Such coupons are not used to collect consumer information or demographic information for the purposes of marketing.
However, there is more to marketing than simply enticing a purchaser by offering free incentive items. Retailers and manufacturers seek information from consumers about the products consumers buy, the motivation behind consumer purchases, and the reasons consumers like or dislike certain products, as a way of improving a product or its marketing methods. Such information is typically obtained through surveys. In some cases, a survey is done by personally interviewing consumers about their purchases and preferences. This type of survey is usually done in-person at a retail outlet, or via telephone or internet. To be effective, the interviews must be done by experienced survey interviewers. Of course, personal surveys of this type are very expensive to conduct.
To cut costs, manufacturers and retailers have resorted to the use of sweepstakes entry forms or rebate coupons to elicit survey data from consumers once a purchase is made. This type of survey is less expensive than one which requires personal interviews, but nonetheless has drawbacks of its own. This type of survey is inefficient due to the historically low redemption rate, typically less than ten percent, of such forms or coupons.
Moreover, for consumer surveys to produce meaningful responses from consumers, the survey itself must not distort the responses. Deliberate purchasing enticements skew the survey data results. A company that wishes to understand the profile of its customers prefers to discover who is purchasing its products, absent any deliberate enticement to do so. Therefore, it is usually desirable when attempting to collect survey results via product purchasing to obscure the incentive item attached to the product or product package, so that the precise nature of the incentive item cannot be ascertained until after the customer has made the purchase.
The ability to obtain questionnaire data from customers in a manner that both elicits a response without necessarily enticing a purchase and is also adaptable to the myriad types of container and products available in retail stores remains a challenge in the art.
Manufacturers and retailers may also seek to combine enticing consumers to purchase a product with collecting consumer data information through surveys. In that case, the portions of an incentive item may be visible on a product package. However, even where a customer can perceive that they may be getting something in addition to the product which they are purchasing, it is important to obscure the precise nature of the incentive item.
In addition, when obscuring the nature of the incentive item attached to the product or product package, a company must be mindful of whether the incentive item covers any important package information.
Moreover, companies often seek to instill product loyalty in consumers by offering consumers free promotional items, such as magnets. These magnets may be imprinted with a company's logo, providing continued advertising while the magnet is in use in a customer's home.
Accordingly, there is a need for a pre-approved incentive card delivery system that is adaptable to the myriad types of containers and products available in retail stores and that allows delivery of a pre-approved incentive card that requires a recipient to participate in a survey to redeem the incentive item in such a manner that both draws customer attention to the presence of the card within the label while not explicitly revealing its presence in a retail store.
Furthermore, there is a need for a label which can provide an incentive card in combination with necessary product labeling information even if the stick-on label covers up all or part of the product package's label.
There is also the need for a label and inventive item which is provided in combination for ease of use.
There is even further the need for a combination label and incentive item that can be manufactured in a cost effective manner.
There is yet further the need for a label and incentive item having an advertising mechanism a consumer can retain after the product package has been disposed of.
The present invention fills those needs.